THE GAMES LESSON

When you went to English or Maths class at school, you could reasonably expect the teacher to talk you through a Shakespeare play, explain the principals of algebra, be enigmatic as to why you'll ever need to know long division. But, when you went to the gym class, you were expected to already know everything before you got there. That's a tremendously daunting situation to put an 11 year old child in, especially if, like me, you don't come from a sports literate family.

At my school, they called that class Physical Education, but the emphasis was clearly more on the physical than the education. The games teacher would offer no quarter if you didn't know the rules of these games. You weren't given any clues about these things.

To this day, I don't know much about football or cricket or rugby. Am I supposed to have somehow imbibed this information through some kind of societal telepathy before I attended those classes?

"Football"? Well, I figure there's a ball and there are feet. Unless it's a 12 inch ball, of course, that's always a possibility. I don't know how far the goalie can move. I don't know who's offside. I don't know about the legal ways of tackling people. Hey, I don't even know who's on which side most of the time. Nobody's explained any of these things to me. Unless it involves my granddad in the backyard, I'm really at a complete loss here.

This is why the school geek is a standard of teenage films. It's not physical incompetence which makes these people bad at sports, it's just that no one ever explained the rules.